A large Silicon Valley campus that's been home to office tenants for decades is set to be transformed into single-family homes, marking the latest push among developers and state leaders to address California's housing shortage.
Harvest Properties and Stockbridge purchased the 379,615-square-foot Clearview Business Park in San Mateo, California, with plans to re-entitle the 22-acre property at 3000–3155 Clearview Way as a residential development. Plans call for 225 for-sale townhouses and single-family homes, 15% of which will be set aside for low-income households.
“Our redevelopment plan responds directly to two regional realities — the ongoing housing shortage and the structural challenges facing the office market,” said Preston O’Connell, a partner at Harvest Properties. “This project represents a higher and better use of the land and aligns with the city’s General Plan goals to build over 7,000 new housing units in the coming years.”
The proposal aims to incorporate energy-efficient homes, drought-tolerant landscaping, and a combination of modern and traditional architecture to reflect the surrounding community. Landscaped paseos, gathering areas, and a central green space aim to support “active living and community connection,” said the companies in a press release.
Addressing California's housing crisis
California officials, in response to climbing housing costs, implemented the state's most ambitious pipeline goals with the 2021 update of its Regional Needs Housing Allocation, calling for 2.5 million housing units by 2031, with more than 1 million of those reserved for people making below area median incomes.
As of 2024, most major cities are far behind. Los Angeles will need to more than triple its permitting pace to hit its required 57,000 units per year, according to a report from the city's planning department. San Francisco is further behind, reaching just 9% of its eight-year target by the end of 2024.
Despite leading the nation in office vacancies and housing unaffordability, San Francisco has lagged behind other U.S. cities that have been successful in enabling such office-to-housing conversion projects, such as Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and New York, which have hit on creative ways to overcome structural and financial barriers to repurposing commercial property into living spaces.
Now, it appears developers are demolishing office sites altogether for single-family uses rather than addressing the challenges of adaptive reuse.
Harvest and Stockbridge are expected to demolish the six office buildings at 3000–3155 Clearview Way. Several of those buildings are leased to GoPro through 2026. The campus was built in 1973 and previously served as Visa International’s headquarters. GoPro moved in in 2011.
It's not Harvest's first for-sale residential conversion of an office park. In 2019, the firm paired with Invesco to buy an aging office complex in San Mateo and entitled the site for townhomes. It has since sold parcels to builders, including PulteGroup, which has opened a for-sale housing project totaling 156 units at the site.
